Taking on Ark Times Bloggers on the “Absurdity of Life without God!!” Part 2 (NIETZSCHE predicted that someday people would realize the implications of their atheism)
July 6, 2013 3:20 pm
The Bible and Science (Part 02)
How Can We Demonstrate that Objective Moral Values Exist to a Nihilist Who Holds
The Bethinking National Apologetics Day Conference: “Countering the New Atheism” took place during the UK Reasonable Faith Tour in October 2011. Christian academics William Lane Craig, John Lennox, Peter J Williams and Gary Habermas lead 600 people in training on how to defend and proclaim the credibility of Christianity against the growing tide of secularism and New Atheist popular thought in western society.
In this session, William Lane Craig delivers his critique of Richard Dawkins’ objections to arguments for the existence of God, followed by questions and answers from the audience. In this clip, Dr Craig addresses a question about how objective moral values can be demonstrated to a Nihilist, who hold that they are illusory.
I have discussed many subjects with my liberal friends over at the Ark Times Blog in the past and I have taken them on now on the subject of the absurdity of life without God in the picture. Most of my responses included quotes from William Lane Craig’s book THE ABSURDITY OF LIFE WITHOUT GOD. Here is the result of one of those encounters from June of 2013:
I wrote:
Zatharus, let me show you the result of your atheism. You wrote, “You are here because your parents had sex; knowledge of an afterlife is even less knowable than a before life; other than that created by the person, 42. Can we now discuss the dichotomy of existentialism?”
Then you quoted, Friedrich Nietzsche, “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.”
________________
NIETZSCHE understood what a lot of people today fail to realize.
William Lane Craig writes:
Do you understand the gravity of the alternatives before us? For if God exists, then there is hope for man. But if God does not exist, then all we are left with is despair. Do you understand why the question of God’s existence is so vital to man? As Francis Schaeffer aptly put it, “If God is dead, then man is dead, too.”
Unfortunately, the mass of mankind do not realize this fact. They continue on as though nothing has changed. I’m reminded of NIETZSCHE’S story of the madman who in the early morning hours burst into the marketplace, lantern in hand, crying, “I seek God! I seek God!” Since many of those standing about did not believe in God, he provoked much laughter. “Did God get lost?” they taunted him. “Or is he hiding? Or maybe he has gone on a voyage or emigrated!” Thus they yelled and laughed. Then, writes Nietzsche, the madman turned in their midst and pierced them with his eyes.
“Whither is God?” he cried, “I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? … God is dead…. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?”14
The crowd stared at the madman in silence and astonishment. At last he dashed his lantern to the ground. “I have come too early,” he said. “This tremendous event is still on its way—it has not yet reached the ears of man.” People did not yet truly comprehend the consequences of what they had done in killing God. But NIETZSCHE predicted that someday people would realize the implications of their atheism; and this realization would usher in an age of nihilism—the destruction of all meaning and value in life. The end of Christianity, wrote NIETZSCHE, means the advent of nihilism. This most gruesome of guests is standing already at the door. “Our whole European culture is moving for some time now,” wrote NIETZSCHE, “with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade, as toward a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end, that no longer reflects, that is afraid to reflect.”15
MOST PEOPLE STILL DO NOT REFLECT ON THE CONSEQUENCES OF ATHEISM AND SO, LIKE THE CROWD IN THE MARKETPLACE, GO UNKNOWINGLY ON THEIR WAY. But when we realize, as did Nietzsche, what atheism implies, then his question presses hard upon us: how shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?
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